Comment by turnsout
7 months ago
This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books like Jobs—as a visionary who introduced technology that changed the world.
He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AGI/super-intelligence. He needs to beat Sam Altman.
The sad thing is, even if he does beat Sam to AGI, Sam will still probably get the credit as the visionary.
> Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones.
Steve Jobs neither gave/invented GUIs nor smartphones. :-D
Xerox created the GUI, and much of modern computing, but Jobs/Apple certainly deserve credit for the smartphone.
Before the iPhone the phone market was primarily "feature phones" - flip phones with a keyboard and a few built-in JavaScript apps. The Blackberry wasn't much different - just a better keyboard with a focus on messaging/business use.
The iPhone was quite radical - masterfully presented as an iPod, phone, and internet communications device, before revealing that they were all capabilities of the same device.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4
The effect on the phone market was immediate, and turned the market upside down. It was basically the end of Nokia who had been dominant up to that point, and caused everyone else to scrap current plans and go back to the drawing board, realizing that this new pocket-computer smartphone concept, with it's large touch screen interface was obviously the future.
The smartphone is nothing more than a merge of a traditional cell phone (what we now call "feature phone") and a PDA. Such a merge would happen sooner or later, either with PDAs acquiring the ability to also act as cell phones, or with cell phones gaining the ability to also act as PDAs. Apple might have accelerated that change, but it was inevitable.
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He didn’t have to be the first to be the one most associated with popularizing the technology.
That just shows you how warped the minds of the general public are. They fail to realize the only thing Jobs did was know the right people then take all the credit…
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Lmao right!? Dude stole all that from Xerox and MS came out with palm pilots early 2000s then you had black berry. Amazing how many people think CEOs actually did the work they get credit for when they almost virtually all were in the right spot with the right people. Notice none of them can reproduce or start another ultra successful startup… Zuckerberg is a perfect example of one hit wonder and he wasn’t even the first to create social sites.. You had MySpace and a ton of others..
Palm Pilots and Blackberrys existed before the iPhone, so why don't they exist anymore? Why are their founders historical side notes?
Because they didn't usher in the smartphone revolution. They just weren't good enough for the mass market. Palm was a great early start, but so was Apple's Newton.
So yes, the idea of a smartphone and some of the components existed before the iPhone, but nothing was "stolen." Jobs was the one who first crystalized the smartphone as we know it now. And yes, he used a team, because CEOs don't literally do all of the work of the company.